Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Yiddish Literary Tradition

Abstract

During this past decade a literary figure from the somewhat isolated and obscure Yiddish tradition has moved commandingly into the general cognizance of contemporary Western thought and letters. Isaac Bashevis Singer, an Eastern European emigrant to America who has been writing fiction prolifically for over half a century, is now translated, published, reviewed, and contemplated in many countries and languages. Commentary, The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic Monthly, New Republic, and Saturday Review have offered his work in this country; Irving Howe, Susan Sontag, Kenneth Rexroth, David Boroff, and Richard Ellman have studied it. Although the American public has brushed against Yiddish literature in Sholem Aleykhem's Tevye of "Fiddler on the Roof," the folk characters of the Yiddish theater in New York, and such novels as The Nazarene and Moses of Sholem Ash, it is now through Singer's work that we have come to reckon with this rich background. The emergence of this vigorous and original artist from the Yiddish source is something of a paradox, because that thousand-year-old tradition is moribund. It is small exaggeration to say that when a speaker of Yiddish dies today, there is no one to replace him. A century ago there were about ten million Yiddish speakers in Russia, Central Europe, the New World, and elsewhere, almost sixty percent of the earth's Jews. But since their vast annihilation in the Second World War, this idiom, regarded by some linguists as one of humanity's richest because of the accretion of so many other tongues, is vanishing. About half of the Yiddish speakers died under the Nazis and the remaining ones are to be found in North and South America, Russia, and Israel, practically all bilingual. Yiddish, from judisch or Jewish, is a medieval vernacular of the Ashkenazim in Europe with a grammatical structure and predominant vocabulary from Middle High German of the middle Rhine region. Written in Hebrew characters, the language includes many Hebrew words that predate the development of Yiddish. These range from such familiär terms as beheyme for "animal" and efsher, "perhaps," to the sacred phrases of prayer, now augmented by some neologisms from Israel. The literary tradition was largely oral until the nineteenth century, but a manuscript of Yiddish epic poems written in 1382 has been found in Egypt and religious books were published in Amsterdam and Warsaw in the seventeenth century. Although the first Yiddish daily was Der yidisher telegraf of 1877-78 in Bucharest, Rumania, the Yudishe Gazetn appeared soon after on June 8, 1881, in New York City. It is there that the Yiddish literary tradition has its center today. The remaining community is largely a literate, informed, fiction-reading audience, supporting three daily papers: Forverts, Tog-Morgn-Zhurnal, and Morgn-